Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice. —Kassner

For a long time he attained it in looking. Stars would fall to their knees beneath his compelling vision. Or as he looked on, kneeling, his urgency's fragrance tired out a god until it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so that they were terrified: building them up again, suddenly, in an instant! But how often the landscape, overburdened by day, came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped into his open look, grazing, and the imprisoned lions stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom; birds, as it felt them, flew headlong through it; and flowers, as enormous as they are to children, gazed back into it, on and on.

And the rumor that there was someone who knew how to look, stirred those less visible creatures: stirred the women.

Looking how long? For how long now, deeply deprived, beseeching in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home— the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom moody around him, and in the avoided mirror once more the room, and later from the tormenting bed once more: then in the air the voices discussed, beyond comprehension, his heart, which could still be felt; debated what through the painfully buried body could somehow be felt—his heart; debated and passed their judgment: that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking. And the world that is looked at so deeply wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart-work on all the images imprisoned within you; for you overpowered them: but even now you don't know them. Learn, inner man, to look at your inner woman, the one attained from a thousand natures, the merely attained but not yet beloved form.

"The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely...is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay or...learning to come back, to return to the present over and over again."

Salubrion Enso Clock

"In Zen Buddhist painting, ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body-spirit create. The brushed ink of the circle is usually done on silk or rice paper in one movement and there is no possibility of modification: it shows the expressive movement of the spirit at that time."